106 de: in the First World War, there were more than a million Indian combatants, of whom sixty thousand died; during the Second World War, the number of Indians in uniform doubled. Yet, even as these Indian soldiers wan- dered the world in the service of the Em- pire, many, perhaps most, of them har- bored treason in their hearts. Indeed, the story of the Raj could well be told as a narrative of failed mutinies, even if most were small-scale affairs that were sup- pressed with a few executions and then quickly hushed up. (The one exception was the great sepoy-led uprising of 1857, which engWfed the most populous parts of the subcontinent and came dose to push- ing the British out of northern India.) My father is one of many Indians who believe that the British would not have left India when they did had they not been faced with the prospect of a large- scale mutiny soon after the end of the war. Yet mutiny did not figure in his own story: by the end of the war, he was a lieu- tenant colonel and had twice been men- tioned in dispatches. He is seventy-six now, and I am forty-one. I know most of his stories by heart: I have listened to them over and over again, with that special boredom which sons keep for their fa- thers' memories. Now, half a cenmry after Independence, I have discovered a new in- terest in these stories, not for what they say but for all that they left unsaid. What was he fighting for? What were his loy- alties? Did he, too, nurture treason in his heart? I N Michael Ondaatje's novel "The En- glish Patient," a character says of the Indian soldier Kip, 'What is he doing fighting English wars?" For my father, the story of the war began simply. The youngest in a large family, he grew up in Chapra, a town whose only distinction was that it served as the seat of its district He left to go to college, and then, without tell- ing his family, he applied for a place in the Indian Military Academy, a prestigious officers' training school in the North Indian town of Dehra Dun. He was accepted as a "gentleman-cadet" in 1942 and was commissioned the next year as a second lieutenant. My father was lucky to get in; a gen- eration earlier, he would have stood ht- tle chance Like other institutions of the British Empire, the Indian Army was run on elaborate theories of race, which spe- cified exactly which groups were fit for enlistment. In practice, these theories es- tablished a system of rewards to give the favored groups incentives to be loyal to the British. After the Mutiny of1857, the Army recruited mainly from the area known as the Punjab (now divided be- tween Pakistan and India). But by 1942 the exigencies of the Second World War had caused these racial dogmas to be laid aside, and the Indian Army began recruit- ing officers from every part of the subcon- tinent. By the time my father joined, one in every ten officers was Indian. Late in 1943, my father's battalion was sent to the border between India and Japanese-occupied Burma A few months later, the Japanese attempted to invade In- dia. As the fighting progressed, there were rumors that the enemy units consisted not just of Japanese but also of some Indians: they were part of a traitorous group that had been given the name J apanese- Indian Fifth Column-or Jiffs, for short. Slowly, things turned against the J ap- anese, and my father's battalion captured some of these Jiffs. To the Indians, the encounters came as a shock "They were starving," my father recalls. "Their bod- ies were covered with jungle sores. They had no provisions and nearly no ammu- nition. But they still fought, with a crazy kind of courage." The Jiffs were dressed in old uniforms of the British Indian Anny. Soon my fa- ther and his friends learned that many of them were from the same regiments that they were, and that their officers had graduated from the same academy. On being questioned, the Jiffs said that they belonged to the Azad Hind Fauj, or Indian National Army, a group formed by Indian pris- oners of war in Japanese- -;" ;\?- occupied Malaya and Sing- ". . _ ;. apore. They described this .g; 1 arm y as the milita ry arm of a -:.!: .;.. .. government in exile headed by Subhas Chandra Bose, a former pres- ident of the Congress Party. To my father and his colleagues, these accounts sounded concocted and vaguely fantastic. Subhas Bose was a charismatic figure with a huge political following in India. Before the war, he had been one of the most important contenders for the country's leadership. It was well known that he had disappeared from his Calcutta home early in the war and hadn't been heard of since. Officers like my father THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 23 & 30, 1997 had no reason to believe their prison- ers accounts, and most of them accepted what their superiors told them-that the Jiffs were turncoats, whom the Japan- ese had won over either by intimidation or wIth money and other inducements. Sometimes quarrels broke out, With In- dian soldiers accusing their captIves of being traitors. " I ' h h . " h t s you W 0 are t e traItors, t e prisoners would shout back. "You kill your own people to earn your living! You are an army of mercenaries, and your job is to keep your own country enslaved." To the comparatively well-fed soldiers on the British side of the lines, there was something pitiful In the idea that these men fancied themselves patriots, who were going to liberate India from the British. But they were in for a shock when they returned home at the end of the war. It was the former Jtffs who were treated as heroes. Wartime censorship had kept the In- dian public almost completely ignorant of the Indian National Army. But in Au- gust, 1945, shortly after Japan's surren- der, the news of Bose's death reached In- dia. It caused an immediate sensation. Newspapers revealed that he had been the head of an army that numbered some forty thousand, and that the millions- strong expatriate-Indian community of Southeast Asia had supported Bose's government in exile with both manpower and large contributions of money. Jour- nalists who went to Burma to interview survivors were awestruck by the scale of the movement: the rebel administra- tion had had its own hospitals and train- ing camps and a bank in Rangoon, whose funds exceeded that of the government of Burma. In the eyes of the British, Bose and the members of his provisional govern- ment had been stooges of Japanese mili- tarism. The British regarded tM, offi- cers of the Indian National Army as par- ticularly contemptible, renegades who had betrayed their oaths of allegiance upon being faced with adversity The colonial government in New Delhi realized that it was impossible to punish all those who had joined the Indian Na- tional Army: there were simply too many. But the government believed that some of the rebels had brutalized Indian pris- oners of war who had remained loyal to the British, and an example had to be made Field Marshal Lord Wavell took the VIew that once the facts were brought